Ev Williams Discusses Medium and Twitter
Evan Williams, CEO of Medium and co-founder of Twitter, spent more time talking about Twitter than he did his current startup, Medium.

Williams said Twitter's search for a CEO started just a month ago, driven by Dick Costolo's decision to step down from the role, and said they were looking for an "exceptional leader" to help define the direction of the company and lead the team. Twitter has lots of potential, he said, but the challenge is to determine the future direction and focus of the company. Asked by interviewer Walter Isaacson about the challenge a new CEO would have working with a board that has three or four former CEOs of the company on it, Williams said he would be willing to leave the board if it helped the company land the right CEO.

On Medium, Williams said he started it three years ago because he "felt there was so much left to do to help people share important ideas on the Internet." He said he first got excited about the Internet 20 years ago as "a way to get our voices heard," which led to the creation of Blogger.

Blogs were a great idea and became the native Web publishing format, and then social media dropped the barrier even further. But, he said, when he looked at the world in 2011, he found that lowering cost and increasing speed didn't necessarily make us all smarter. So the goal with Medium was to help people create better things together than they could on their own, in order to attract attention to topics that have value to them rather than what is popular or new. In other words, he said, "how to harness the collective intelligence of the Internet." With Medium, if you're logged in, the experience is similar to reading a book that you've marked, while also seeing the comments of other readers, thus tapping into the power of the network. He said he sees Medium as a large and interesting business, and one that is just getting started.

Fitbit CEO on Why Fitness Tracking Isn't Just a Fad

Fitbit CEO and co-founder James Park, whose company recently went public and now has a valuation of more than $9 billion, said he was more concerned about creating great products than valuation. He said Fitbit wasn't afraid to go public, because operationally the company has been profitable for quite a while, and he wanted to give it liquidity. He said having a public currency would allow it to be more aggressive in acquisitions, and when asked about the difficulty of meeting quarterly numbers, he said, "my outlook is never to have a rough quarter."

Park said that Fitbit is not just a wearables company; rather, the company's mission is to use technology to help people be healthier and more active. He said that consumers are taking a more proactive approach to their health and fitness, and that this is a strong secular trend, not a fad. Compared with things like gym membership, devices like Fitbit have incredible retention, in part because the social layer on top of the device is very powerful. (In other words, because people share their results with their friends, they are motivated to keep going.) In addition, the company also has a tracker scale, and using the two products together has been more successful for helping people lose weight. He said the company has relationships with 50 Fortune 500 companies to help their employees be healthier and thus reduce employer healthcare costs.

According to Park, the secret to its success has been the combination of hardware and software, as well as distribution: Fitbit products are available in 45,000 stores in 50 countries, with channel marketing. Asked about various lawsuits brought against the company by competitors, he said he can't comment on ongoing litigation. He noted that Fitbit has 200 patents, but said that innovation is not reflected only by the number of patents you have, but also in market impact, and said that Fitbit now has about an 85 percent share of the U.S. fitness tracker market.

On the question of the valuations for private companies, Park noted that when the company was small, it was unable to raise much capital, so that forced it to be very disciplined. As a result, the operating leverage is pretty high.

Quirky CEO on the Benefits of Community, the Perils of Startups
Start-ups are hard work, a point brought home by Quirky CEO Ben Kaufman's candid description of how the company's original business model  taking product ideas suggested by and championed by a community, and creating these products  failed, and how Quirky plans to move forward.

Kaufman told Fortune's Alan Murray that the original model  which involved manufacturing the products and distributing them at big box retail  required creating tens of thousands of each product, with thin margins, which resulted in a "huge negative number." In addition, while the company had significant success with little products, such as a hinged power strip (that indeed is quite nice  I use one), the brand didn't stretch as much as the company thought it would. "People didn't want a $350 Quirky air conditioner," he said. "They want a good one that works."

The company is now working on a different business model, Kaufman said, where it still finds great ideas from communities and tries to bring these to market at breakneck speed, but through partnerships it is building with GE, Harmon, Mattel, and therefore not risking its own capital.

Another part of the business is Wink, which he described as the leading connected home platform. Wink enables multiple connected home products to work together. Kaufman said Quirky invested more than $120 million in Wink, and while it is growing quickly, it is still losing money. If he had to do it over again, he said, he wouldn't do Wink as a "startup within a startup" but would have set it up as a separate company.

Quirky is currently trying to raise more capital, and Kaufman called the problems with the Quirky and Wink "a complex story." He said Quirky still receives 4,000 ideas per week, and that if it was a separate business, Wink might be seen as doing well, but having to fix both at the same time is difficult.

Michael J. Miller's Forward Thinking Blog: forwardthinking.pcmag.com
Michael J. Miller is chief information officer at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. From 1991 to 2005, Miller was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine, responsible for the editorial direction, quality and presentation of the world's largest computer publication.
Until late 2006, Miller was the Chief Content Officer for Ziff Davis Media, responsible for overseeing the editorial positions of Ziff Davis's magazines, websites, and events. As Editorial Director for Ziff Davis Publishing since 1997, Miller took an active role in...
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